Greal: el secreto de las 8 llaves
Greal: El secreto de las ocho llaves is a narrative innovation project that combines literature, audio fiction and audiovisual experience, exploring new ways of telling stories through technology. Written by Javier Sierra, the work is built around a complex and symbolic narrative universe that required a visual treatment capable of matching its conceptual depth.
Our role in the project focused on integrating artificial intelligence as a creative tool, without losing artistic control or narrative consistency. The starting point was the base illustrations created by artists Lluc Baliarda and Claudia Durán, which established the style, atmosphere and overall art direction of the project.
From this initial material, we gathered illustrations, characters and backgrounds to train our own artificial intelligence model, created specifically for Greal. One of the main challenges in this process was achieving a completely consistent result, ensuring that the AI adapted precisely to the style, colour palette and aesthetics of the main artwork, without deviating from the visual language established by the original illustrations.
This model allowed us to generate new visual elements that remained consistent with the existing graphic universe, expanding the visual language of the work and making it easier to produce the resources needed to tell the story in a fluid and coherent way.
AI was used to create additional visual elements, backgrounds, details and graphic resources that complemented the original illustrations. In cases where a higher level of precision or a more specific creative intention was required, we also produced additional hand-drawn illustrations, integrating them into the same visual system.
One of the most complex and significant stages of the project was the complete assembly of the chapters, bringing together narrative, imagery, animation and audiovisual rhythm. We were responsible for composing all the episodes, ensuring visual consistency and maintaining narrative tension throughout the story.
This work included the design and animation of text boxes, character movements and animations, visual effects, as well as the opening and closing transitions for each chapter, ensuring an immersive and seamless experience for the viewer.
The project was developed entirely in Spanish and Catalan, adapting the editing and visual elements to both languages, which added an extra layer of technical and narrative complexity.
The result is an audiovisual experience that demonstrates how artificial intelligence, when integrated within a clear art direction, can become a powerful tool for expanding complex narrative universes. Greal is an example of how technology can be placed at the service of creativity and storytelling, opening up new possibilities for the future of digital storytelling.